Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Onetime Antiwar, Environmental Protester Veers Into the Seamy World of Anti-Semitism

While most American-born activists who become involved in defending
Palestinian rights avoid becoming overt anti-Semites even while
steadfastly criticizing Israel, Kenneth O’Keefe is not one of them.

O’Keefe, a former Marine-turned-antiwar and anti-environmental
activist who specializes in what he calls “direct action,” has morphed
in recent years into a raving, David Duke-endorsing anti-Semite,
particularly in the speeches he gives to well-known white-supremacist
groups.

The most noteworthy of these was O’Keefe’s speech to the IONA London Forum,
a gathering of academically oriented white supremacists and
anti-Semites held last August. The speech was noteworthy for its crude
ugliness: the 50-plus-minute-talk by O’Keefe revolved around the
repeated phrase “fucking Jews.”

You know, I remember as a kid, the worst insult you could
say to somebody — which I didn’t even know the origin of it, but we
used to all use it — and it was no basis of any kind of discrimination,
it was just this term — and it was Jew. In the worst way, fucking Jew.
You know, you’re a fucking Jew, or something like that.

And you know, I never really thought about it. I didn’t have any
Jewish friends as far as I knew, and yet I look back at it now and I
realize it must be that there is some truth behind this, that it would
be the ultimate insult, that’s somehow there’s this awareness without
even being aware of the historical reality of Jewish impact on human
history.”

That’s only the start of what was an epic emission of hate speech
from O’Keefe at the forum. In the past, he has specialized in “straight
talking” appearances before various groups, but now he has shaped them
in the mold of a profane David Duke, the neo-Nazi and former Klan
leader.

As his mainstream-seeming bio
at Veterans Today explains, O’Keefe was a Gulf War veteran who first
garnered attention in the 1990s by exposing the use of depleted uranium
in that war.

O'Keefe (right) with Watson in 2000

O’Keefe also was involved for many years in fairly radical environmental causes, having hooked up in 1998
with Paul Watson and his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, where he
eventually became the organization’s regional director in Hawaii and led
the group as it rescued sea turtles and spoke out against Navy sonar activities.

A turn in O’Keefe’s career occurred in May 2001, when he was aboard the Turkish ship M.V. Mavi Marmara
when it attempted to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip and
was subsequently boarded by Israeli commandos, resulting in the deaths
of nine activists. Then, in 2003, he began leading delegations of peace
activists who attempted to act as “human shields” to protest the U.S.
invasion of Iraq.

In 2004, he burned his U.S. passport in an attempt to renounce his
American citizenship — he was replacing his old documents with a “world
passport,” he explained, and called himself a “Citizen of the World”
with “ultimate allegiance to my entire human family and to planet
Earth.” However, as O’Keefe’s Wikipedia page explains, the State Department has never recognized this renunciation, even though O’Keefe describes himself at his website now as the holder of “Irish, Hawaiian and Palestinian citizenship.”

Then, O’Keefe appeared on Duke’s radio show in February 2013,
where the pair discussed, according to Duke’s description, “the
Hollywoodism Conference in Tehran, Iran. It exposes the Zio control of
Hollywood which not only promotes lies about the enemies of Jewish
extremism, but literally poisons the hearts and minds of hundreds of
millions of people in West and all over the world.”

Later that year, Duke’s website featured an exchange between O’Keefe and anti-Semitic saxophonist/“scholar” Gilad Atzmon, a self-described “self-hating ex-Jew” whose writings and pronouncements are rich in conspiracy theories, Holocaust trivialization and distortion, and open support of anti-Israeli terrorist groups.

O’Keefe also made an appearance
on a Russia Today interview program in October 2013, where he declared
that President Obama should be tried for treason and added that “this
man is a dictator who has assigned himself the right to execute anyone.”

When he was introduced at the London gathering in August 2014,
his host boasted that O’Keefe was “a friend of David Duke.” But even
that couldn’t have prepared the audience for the profanity-laced rant
against “the fucking Jews” that followed.

The mantra that I’ve gone by for many years now is TJP:
truth, justice, peace. It’s pissed me off, the peace movement – what do
you mean, “peace”? Fuck peace in this world. Fuck that shit, I’d rather
die. I’d rather kill some of these bastards that are trying to destroy
this world and take control of everything. Fuck you. I’d rather die.
Peace without justice is not worth having, bottom line. Peace at the
barrel of a gun is not fucking peace.

And he predicted that eventually the scenario would play out in mob violence and retribution:

I really feel that as long as we know the truth, the
truth, an honest truth about what these people have done, then justice
will play itself out quite naturally. We won’t really need to even
manipulate it or set it up. It’ll happen. But we need to know the truth.
And a lot of people are going to be hanging from lampposts or worse,
I’m sure. I don’t doubt that for a second. All these people — they’ve
got hell to pay.

O’Keefe described former Rep. Ron Paul, a frequent candidate for the
presidency with a penchant for attracting extremists to his cause, as
“an incredible exception” to the corruption of American politics, which
he described as “a servile, disgusting, treasonous body of assholes who
actually have sold the American nation down the river.”

“The rest of ‘em, almost without exception, are a bunch of fucking
puppets, and they’re a disgrace. And they should be rounded up and
arrested for fucking treason — forthwith.”

For adopting such extremist beliefs and espousing such hateful
nonsense, O’Keefe and Atzmon have been heavily marginalized within the
larger Palestinian-rights and antiwar communities.

We reaffirm that there is no room in this historic and
foundational analysis of our struggle for any attacks on our Jewish
allies, Jews, or Judaism; nor denying the Holocaust; nor allying in any
way shape or form with any conspiracy theories, far-right, orientalist,
and racist arguments, associations and entities. Challenging Zionism,
including the illegitimate power of institutions that support the
oppression of Palestinians, and the illegitimate use of Jewish
identities to protect and legitimize oppression, must never become an
attack on Jewish identities, nor the demeaning and denial of Jewish
histories in all their diversity.

Indeed, we regard any attempt to link and adopt antisemitic or racist
language, even if it is within a self-described anti-imperialist and
anti-Zionist politics, as reaffirming and legitimizing Zionism. In
addition to its immorality, this language obscures the fundamental role
of imperialism and colonialism in destroying our homeland, expelling its
people, and sustaining the systems and ideologies of oppression,
apartheid and occupation. It leaves one squarely outside true solidarity
with Palestine and its people.

A similar group of Palestinian intellectuals and activists co-signed a lengthy statement denouncing Atzmon
and his supporters, concluding: “At this historic junction — when the
need to struggle for the liberation of Palestine is more vital than ever
and the fault lines of capitalist empire are becoming more widely
exposed — no anti-oppressive revolution can be built with ultra-right
allies or upon foundations friendly to creeping fascism.”

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.